﻿WORDSWORTH 's MIXD 



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that he answered: 'It feels as if all my knowledge of my charac- 

 ters and all my own experience of life were simultaneously pre- 

 pared foi' me to draw from; I select, and what I select is at my 

 fingers' end to write.' The first books of 'The Prelude' are, in a 

 way, an analysis of this power to continue vividly the consciousness 

 of past sensational states. They contain the explanation of what 

 Wordsworth means when he says poetry is emotion recollected in 

 tranquillity till the tranquillity disappears. They are his defini- 

 tion of genius. 



With the poet the secret of it all lies in associative power, in 

 making past sensational states permanent by imaging them in 

 external nature. He carefully explains that the 'airy phantasies 

 that had been floating loose about for years' are to be endued with 

 outward life. For poetry without images is an 'unsubstantial 

 structure,' melting 'before the very sun that brightens it, mist 

 into air dissolving. ' The dissipation of poetic energy by the pleas- 

 ure of mere feeling, by the failure to endue feeling with structure 

 and form, is the disease of youth. AVordsworth confesses that he 

 suffered from this sort of vacuity, that he was for long 



BaiUed and plagued by a mind that every hour 

 Turns recreant to her task ; takes heart again. 

 Then feels immediately some hollow thought 

 Hang lilve an interdict upon her hopes. 



A hollow thought is, of course, a thought unimaged. In such a 

 mood he feels 'like a false steward who hath much received and 

 renders nothing back.' 'Was it for this,' he cries in self-reproach, 

 'that one, the fairest of all rivers, loved to blend his murmurs with 

 my nurse 's song ? ' 



A thousand inspiring memories of his childhood crowd upon 

 him, of that time when all things struck the eye over-vividly, when 

 'the sky seemed not a sky of earth.' when the wind had a real and 

 haunting voice, when there were mysteries for the imagination 

 in every sound and object. So vivid then were things that they 

 seemed to be a part of him, indistinguishable ; so vivid is the recol- 

 lection of them still, in spite of the mde vacancy between him and 

 them, and 'such self-presence' have they in his mind, that, musing 

 on them, he seems 'two consciousnesses, conscious of myself and 

 of some other Being. ' In one of the finest passages in poetry — that 

 beginning, 



Wisdom and Spirit of the rniverse ! 



Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought— 



